predigital

Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

adj. Preceding the advent of digital technology

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

Preceding a digit or the digits.

n. One of the two outermost primaries in the wing of a bird which are attached to the second phalanx of the second digit. The outermost predigital is very small and is that called the spurious primary, or remicle.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

pre- +‎ digital

Examples

"The African Queen," he noted, had been available in the predigital era on VHS and Laserdisc, but the transfer looked as muddy as the bottom of a Central African river.

In predigital days, getting one's hands on hot pictures required running an often impenetrable gantlet of drugstore clerks and newsstand operators, and finding really hard-core material was out of the question.

As a moment in a poem it's probably a little over-compressed, nevertheless I take "context is vinyl" to be an affirmation of the old-school premodernist value of explaining what one is talking about and why, just as audiophiles have come out swinging for predigital recording techniques.

James Surowiecki, in his book "The Wisdom of Crowds," points to predigital examples such as a contest at a country fair to guess the weight of an ox, which combined guesses from experts and nonexperts, resulting in a nearly perfect answer.

There are glimmers: The new Amazon book reader may bring the best of predigital life forward into the present, and any number of institutions are (gradually) exploring ways to harness the new communications environment for scholarship, innovation and profit rather than idle enjoyment.